Businesses, governmental organizations and other entities are increasingly saving large volumes of data necessary for daily operations. This data represents a significant asset for these entities. Consequently, data loss, whether accidental or caused by malicious activity, can be costly in terms of wasted manpower, loss of goodwill from customers, loss of time and potential legal liability. To ensure proper protection of data for business and legal purposes (e.g., to ensure quick recovery of data in the event of a disaster, to comply with document retention requirements, etc.), these entities often back up data to a physical media, such as magnetic tapes or optical disks on a regular basis.
Traditional backup systems placed an application server, backup server, source device, destination device and a local area network (“LAN”) in the data path of backup operations. Under these systems, the LANs were becoming overburdened by the amount of data being copied. Often, the backup window (the period in which data unavailable for normal operations in order to permit backup) was too short to achieve a complete backup of data. Accordingly, many entities implemented Storage Area Networks (“SAN”) to relieve the burden of mass data storage and backup from the LAN, freeing the LAN for more immediate data storage and manipulation operations. In SANs, data from multiple machines on a network may be backed up to a remote media library. Centralized data backup allows storage problems to be identified at one location and has the advantage of increased efficiency.
One example of a media library commonly used in enterprise backup systems is a magnetic tape library. In a typical magnetic tape library, tapes are contained in cartridges and the tape library contains multiple cartridge slots in which tape cartridges can be stored. The tape cartridges are physically moved between cartridge slots and tape drives by a robot. The robot is controlled by access commands received from the host devices on the network. When specific data is required, the host device determines which cartridge slot contains the tape cartridge that holds the desired data. The host device then transmits a move-element command (e.g., the SCSI “move medium” command) to the robot and the robot moves the tape cartridge.
Recently, the Linear Tape File System (LTFS) Format Specification by IBM and the LTO Program (hereby fully incorporated by reference in its entirety for all purposes) has been developed, which defines a file system for LTO-5 tapes, LTO-6 tapes and may be extended to other tapes using an eXtensible Markup Language (XML) schema architecture. The term “file system” may be used interchangeably with “filesystem”. This file system support allows the use of an LTFS-formatted tape as if it were a file system. Files and directories may appear in a directory listing, files may be dragged and dropped from tape, data may be accessed at the file level, etc.
Consequently, while it previously was necessary to make use of a backup application to write and read tapes, the introduction of LTFS has simplified the storing and retrieval of files on tape by reducing such operations to a copy. Furthermore, any operating system that includes LTFS support can mount an LTFS formatted tape and read and write the files thereon.
While LTFS defines a standardized format for the data that is stored on LTFS tapes, allowing the tapes themselves to be written and read by any system that includes LTFS support, the operation of the LTFS-compatible drives themselves is not standardized. In other words, the set of LTFS executable software applications (including at least LTFS, LTFSCK and MKLTFS applications) that controls one manufacturer's drive generally will not be suitable to control another manufacturer's drive. In some cases, a particular manufacturer's executable will be configured so that it will not operate with another manufacturer's drive. Consequently, if a user attempts to access an LTFS tape drive using the wrong LTFS executable, the drive generally will not operate as intended.